Fairfax standardized tests rescheduled after Internet outage

The outage affected roughly 42,000 exams, according to Fairfax County Public Schools spokesman John Torre. About a third — 59 — of the system’s 196 schools were affected.

In addition to the students whose exams were rescheduled, another 4,126 students’ tests were delayed to later on Thursday, Torre said.

However, no students will have to retake tests they completed, and no students were stopped in the middle of a test, according to Charles Pyle, spokesman at the Virginia Department of Education, which oversees the SOL exams.

The tests are administered every year between May 13 and June 7. Students in grades three through eight take math and reading; students in grades three, five and eight take science; students in grades three and five through eight take history; and high school students take SOL exams in math, English, science and history.

Though this year was the first year that elementary school tests were taken online, high school and middle school tests were required to be taken online last year and have for the most part been taken online for several years.

This is the first time an Internet outage has disrupted this many Fairfax County tests, Torre said.

Statewide, there have been Internet and power outages during SOL exams in previous years, Pyle said. However, paper test administrations also have their share of problems.

One year, paper answer sheets were shipped to the test vendor to be scored and fell off a conveyor belt in the shipping facility. All of the students whose answer sheets were lost had to retake their exams.

Online testing also eliminates the security risks that other states have had, Pyle said. In the District, for example, teachers were discovered changing students’ wrong answers to right answers after testing was over.

“Those sorts of things are eliminated with online testing,” Pyle said.

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